Feature comparison
Our solution to run Apache Kafka on Kubernetes comes in the following flavours:
- The Koperator is an open source project that delivers the basic functionality of our solution.
- Cisco Streaming Data Manager is a commercial product that includes all the features mentioned in this guide, commercial support, and optionally integration support.
| Open Source Koperator | Cisco Streaming Data Manager | |
|---|---|---|
| Managed components | Koperator | Koperator, Banzai Cloud Istio operator, Apache ZooKeeper, MirrorMaker 2.0 |
| Support | Community | Enterprise |
| Scaling | ✓ | ✓ |
| Re-balancing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Alert based self healing | ✓ | ✓ |
| Monitoring | Basic | Advanced protocol-level charts and metrics |
| SSL performance | Default | High |
| Security out-of-the-box | ✓ | |
| Disaster recovery | ✓ | |
| Streaming Data Manager operator (declarative CLI) | ✓ | |
| ACL handling: Client authorization through client cert (SSL) when running inside Istio mesh | ✓ | |
| Declaratively handle Kafka ACLs | ✓ | |
| Support volume expansion | ✓ | |
| Manage Schema Registry instances and register schemas declaratively | ✓ | |
| Observability dashboard (UI) | ✓ | |
| Kafka Connect and connector support | ✓ | |
| ksqlDB support | ✓ |